A relaxed mind.....is a creative mind

As readers of this blog might have guessed I have been very upset over the death of my friend Tracey. Not so much her death, but that I wasn't there for her. What is amazing to me is that many of my other friends have been so supportive of me at this time. I can't understand this because I have proved what an awful friend I am so why should all this support be around me like this. One of these friends is the Brazilian woman I stayed with when I first moved from London. I was inclined to lose touch and so I sent her a long email saying everything about how much she means and how happy I was when I stayed there. She came to visit me and brought some flowers, bread and herbal tea. Her warmth and friendship was so unconditional in spite of me losing contact with Tracey for my own selfish and childish reasons. I looked at her with renewed love and appreciation like it might be the last time I would see her. Tracey's death has really shifted something in me.

Tonight I took out the herbal tea she had given me and to my absolute amazement it turns out that it is a tea which the kundalini yoga master Yogi Bhajan used to give to his students after they did the kundalini yoga. There is no way that she could have known this because I never told her that I was doing kundalini yoga. Her reasoning when I asked her 'why that tea' was that it said 'Bedtime tea' and she bought it for me in case I wasn't sleeping. I am in training not to make things mean anything but for some reason I made this very significant in terms of support for me to get through what is happening. And it worked, today I am feeling so much better. The blackness that was everywhere has lifted and I am thinking of things I can do in Tracey's memory.

Each of these teabags comes with a thought and I have been wondering how to continue this blog without referring specifically to the training I am doing. Having a different thought on each teabag has given me the idea of writing my blog posts around the thoughts. This is also going to be a challenge for me because they will be my explorations around these thoughts and they will be just my views. Take this blog entry- the thought for tonight is 'a relaxed mind is a creative mind'. Why should this be? What is is the link between relaxation and creativity. Immediately what springs to mind is Einsteins 'Eureka' when he was in a very relaxed state. I think he was drinking red wine, or else he was in the bath but his state was relaxed. Energy flows naturally and easily when the mind is relaxed. A tense mind freezes energy so it is not free to flow and be creative. The aim of meditation is to relax the mind by seeing that the thoughts and feelings that make up the structure of the mind are not who we are. The tense mind identifies itself with thoughts and feelings and becomes obsessed with these and then there is very little creativity.

Creating some space of silence and stillness is important for the mind to relax. and creativity to emerge. In todays busy world silence is unfortunately very underrated.